COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES 



THE 




n 





ITS METHOD AND ITS RELATION TO THE PHYSICAL 

SCIENCES 



JAMES O. WELLING, LL.D. 

PRESIDENT OF THE COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR OP THE PHILOS- 
OPHY OF HISTORY IN THE SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



JUDD & DETWEIIyKR 
PRINTERS TO THR SCIRNTIPIC SOCIETIES OF WASHINGTON 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 
1894 



The Columbian University, 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



1, The University publishes in this form the results 
of original inquiry or independent research. 

2, This paper was read as an Inaugural Address 
at the opening of the School of Graduate Studies in 
the Columbian University, on the i6th of October, 
1893, and is here published as a Study of Outlines in 
Universal History. 

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THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY : 

lis Method and its Relation to the Physical Sciences. 



" Die TotaliU.i . er Erscheinungeii sind wir siclier zu unifassen, wenn 
wir sie uus uach R a u ni u n d Zeit geordnet deiiken, wenn wir sagen 
Natur und Geschichte." — Droysen. 



Since the days of Heracleitus, ihe Universe, with all that it con- 
tains, has been conceived as in a state of perpetual flux, and as there- 
fore having a history — a history of the fluxes, both quantitative and 
qualitative — which it has undergone in the process of Time. Sir 
Robert Ball tells us that by our telescopes and on our photographs 
we can discern something like one hundred million luminous 
stars, and that the visible stars do not form the hundredth, prob- 
ably not the thousandth, probably not even the millionth, part ' 
of the worlds which lurk unseen in the dark, un fathomed caves of 
the upper ocean. Each of these worlds has a history, if we could 
but know it. The solar s\stem has a history which the science of 
men is slowly spelling out. The round world which we inhabit has 
a history, and all the sciences, in the ascending scales of their suc- 
cessive evolution, combine to set that history in a framework of 
periodic times and of systematic ideas. Geology tells us ho\v our 
Mother Earth through long aeons of the primeval night-time was 
balancing and modulating the cosmic forces which were destined in 
the end to prepare a theatre for man. In Palaeontology we rehearse 
the story of epochs which have long since been surmounted, and 
move among the vanished forms of plants and animals which have 
long since j^erished from the face of the earth. "At the bottom of 
the ocean lie the mountains of former ages, on the summits of the 
Andes and Himalayas are the sands of ancient ocean-beds," while 
the ichthian and saurian monsters which lie sepulchred in those 
rock-ribbed pyramids have been described as the " mummied pha- 
raohs " of an extinct animal dynasty. The crystalline structures of 
our globe, themselves the result of a long historical process, have in 



I COLUMBIAN UNIVEHSITY STUDIES. 

turn been subjected to a thousand historical \ariations through the 
action of light and heat, of air and wind and water, of river denuda- 
tion, of earthquake shock, and of volcanic tremor. The sedentary 
formations washed down from the mountain slopes are a historic 
deposit. The vegetable mould had a long and dateless chronology 
before it was friable enough to be ploughed by earthworms, and 
Darwin has but pointed out in a scientific way the place which 
earthworms have in the economy of nature when he says that "it 
may be doubted whether there are man\- other animals which have 
played so important a part in the history of the world as have these 
lowly organized creatures. "^^ Even protoplasm, at the point where 
we examine it with our microscopes, is found to possess certain his- 
torical properties beyond and above its purely physical and chemi- 
cal constitution. Even germ-plasm, at the point where Weismann 
conceives it as the medium and ground of heredity, is held to have 
attained a definite architecture, which, for the time being, has be- 
come definite because it has been modified by being transmitted his- 
j:orically.f 

1 Nature, says Coleridge, through the whole vast hierarchy of organic 
being, is "prophetic of man." After this prophecy had been ful- 
filled in the advent of man, there was a needs be that Jiiniia/! His- 
tory should come into the foreground, and should be esteemed as 
History in the highest sense of the term, because it marks the times 
and the stages of the perennial universal flux in tlie highest of all 
realms. It is because man is the "roof and crown of things" 
that History, in the truest as well as the highest sense of the term, 
becomes the record and the vehicle of ]iis achievements. The 
generations of men come and go like the leaves of the forest, as old 
Homer sings, but the race of man abides. ' The Science of Uni- 
versal History has for its object to impart unity to the collective 
consciousness of the race by arranging and rehearsing the main 
elements of that consciousness in the logical, because the chrono- 
logical, order of their evolution. 1 History is, therefore, the most 
comprehensive and at the same time the most distinctive form of 
knowledge. The connecting link between all the periods before 
man, it is the golden clasp which binds the fixed past of the human 
race to that undeveloped future which ever lies before it, while in 

"Darwin : Earthworms, p. 313. 

t Weismann : The Germ-plasm, pp. 3S-61. 



THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 3 

its chronicles of the living present it holds the nations under our 
ken in the very hour and article of their creative activities. What 
we may call the Formula of Evolution is to be seen today at its 
highest estate in the advancing columns of the most advanced 
civilizations. The work of Creation is still going on, and is 
going on today at the point of its highest ascension in the read- 
justments of the cosmic order of human society. The Tower of 
Babel is still building, and is building today wherever men are be- 
trayed by confusion of thought and purpose into confusion of 
speech. The rational life of man begins its pure and specific 
activity at the point where, for his highest needs, he can no longer 
find help from the instincts of his animal nature, and with each ad- 
vance in rationality he puts these instincts in a growing- circum- 
scription and confine, that he may the better live the higher life of 
reason. |l'he Science of Universal History is nothing more than an 
orderly and reasoned exposition of the rational activities under the 
pressure of which the human race has moved from stage to stage in 
the subjugation of nature and in the development of its distinctive 
rationality .J P'or this cause it is that the history of the present 
time lands the men of this generation, upon whom the ends of the 
world are come, in the very thick of the "evolutionary process." 
There was a time in the history of the solar system when the 
Formula of Evolution came to expression in the genesis of the 
planetary worlds ; at a later stage, in the genesis of the chemical 
elements; at a still later stage (and for our globe), in the genesis 
of plants and animals ; at still later stages, through the long cycles 
of geologic time, in the transformation of species, until at length 
we witness the arrival of man, endued with a psychical power to 
arrest the forces of natural selection and to substitute for them, in 
certain spheres and to a limited extent, an intellectual selection of 
his own devising. It is according to the measure of man's natural 
supremacy that the whole plant and animal kingdom is put under 
his sovereignty. In man, the centre of gravity of the whole evo- 
lutionary process is shifted from mechanic law to teleologic purpose, 
but to teleologic purpose working in the framework of mechanic 
law, and for this very reason working the more effectively because 
assured of the fixed conditions on which it can operate to purposes 
beyond and above mechanic law. The forces of a natural selection 
which once worked blindly on the animal side of man, for the 
differentiation of races, while as yet a conscious mental purpose 



4 COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES. 

was feeble in the world, are now capable of being put in check on 
the physical side; and, on the basis of such arrested tendencies, a 
new order of evolution, working psychically, above and beyond these 
natural differentiations, is slowly bringing the men of varied races and 
tongues into a new species of moral and intellectual integration — 
an integration which, moving among the differential elements of 
civilized society, tends to assimilate them more and more into 
harmony with some predominant social synthesis. It is in the suc- 
cessive processes of the great moral and intellectual transformations 
which have been wrought in the civilization of the world, by a 
transmitted and hereditary culture, tliat the Science of Universal 
History finds its choicest subject-matter. What we may call the 
potential of civilization, at any given epoch, is to be determined 
for that epoch by marking the index of its collective culture, and by 
gauging the compulsive force which that collective culture impresses 
on the vast complex of forces comprised in i)olitical society. 

Each individual man, says a British philosoplier, is a microcosm 
of the whole intellectual and moral world, and, iintentially speak- 
ing, may be said to contain within hiaiself " an undeveloped in- 
finity of individuals ; " so that " each man is, in ])0ssibility, all 
men, and eacli life, renewed among other scenes, might be multi- 
plied into a history of the world."-'- 

In a word, eacli individual man, as he comes into the world, is 
destined to lead his highest life by virtue of his organic connection 
with the life of the whole human race, and it is the successive ex- 
pansions and over]ai)Sof this race-life, as witnessed in the i)rogress of 
man from savagery to barbarism, from l)arl)arism to the rudiments of 
civilization, and from tlie rudiments of civib'zation to the highest cul- 
minations whi<-h civilization has reached to-day, that tlie Science 
of Universal History aims to unfold in an orderly and a logical con- 
tinuity. In this way the calculus of universal history, working with 
the fixed points whicli mark the successive stages of the human race 
as it has moved along the ascending gradients of the world's culture, 
believes itself to be working with the factors of a positive knowledge 
in tentatively constructing from time to time tlie line and the lau- 
of the social evolution. 

The human mind, in the inosecution of scientific discovery, move^ 
along the lines of least resistance. The first sketch of the Science 



Allen Butler : Ancient IMiilosophy, vol. I, p. 46. 



thp: science of iniversal history. o 

of Universal History was laid in the world's moral order, not by 
accident (there are no accidents in universal history), but because the 
moral order, implicit in human society, especially in the lower stages 
of the social evolution, is more simple than the complicated mechani- 
cal order which is implicit in the physical world at the present stage 
of the physical evolution ; and the moral order of society is not only 
more simple than the physical order (which comes from afar, even 
from the foundation of the world), but it is also more directly ob- 
trusive on the reflective reason of man, as he lives and moves and 
has his being in civil society. The first expositors of the Universal 
Moral Order were the Prophets of Israel, who were the politicians 
as well as the religious guides of Israel. The moral order involved 
in the family, by virtue of its natural constitution, was proclaimed 
by them to be equally involved, mutatis vmtandi<!, in the clan, in 
the tribe, in the confederation of tribes; and this doctrine was af- 
firmed by them to hold good, not only for social structures in Judea, 
but for social structures throughout the whole habitable world — that 
is, this implicit moral order, residing from necessity in civil society, 
was raised by them for the first time into the forms of an explicit 
and universal statement, as broad as humanity and as wide as the 
then known world. " The genius of Israel," says Renan, " was al- 
ways beset with the problems of tlie human race."* The solidarity 
of the race, on the moral side of man, was so clearly perceived by 
the Hebrew vindicators of the universal moral order that they found 
in it the reason and ground why Jehovah piuiished nations en masse. 
So it came to pass that the Prophets figure among men as the Moral 
Reformers, the I^-otestants, the Puritans of their time, and not of 
their own time alone, but of all time. " They give us more than 
politics or statesmanship," says Baron Bunsen, " because they por- 
tray human events in the light of that world-history which tran- 
scends all relations of time and of national peculiarity." It is for 
this reason that Bunsen was wont to say that the backbone of uni- 
versal history runs through Jerusalem, as thereby signifying that the 
moral order of the world is the vertebral column of the social organ- 
ism. The moralities of human life, the elements of the world's 
moral order, however they may vary in their angles of incidence 
and reflection with the ascending scales of social culture, are always 
and everywhere essentially the same, whether this moral order mirror 



* Renan : Hisloire du People d'Israel, pp. 75, 477 



COLUMBIAN UNIVEi;«lTY STUDIES. 

itself in the gnomic wisdom of Ptah-lietep among tlie Egyptians, in 
tlie Proverbs of Solomon, in the Institutes of Confucius, in the 
Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, or in the Offices of Cicero; but 
the moral law which came by Moses was fused into a white heat by 
the consuming zeal of the Hebrew Prophets, and, purified by them 
from the concretions of pagan sensuality and polytheism, it has ever 
since remained an integral part of the world's civilizing deposit. 
So sure were they of this moral order that, as lights shining in a 
dark jjlace, they predicted its final supremacy in a reign of Universal 
Righteousness, extending over the vviiole human family, thus striking 
the keynote of that future state of terrestrial beatitude which meets 
us not only in the Apocalypse of St. John and in the historical con- 
figurations of the Church Fathers, but in the Dialogues of Plato,* in 
the mythical Oracles of the CuuK^^an Syl)il, as transfigured by the 
muse of Vergil, f and even in the Lite of l^iimanuel Kant.| 

If Judea had a genius for morals and for moral conduct, Greece 
had a genius for letters and art, as Rome had a genius for arms and 
polity. But we can easily see why it was that the analytical and 
constructive intellect of the Greeks, as well as the practical reason 
of the politic Romans, should have failed to grasp the conception 
of historical universality in any direction. Ancient society, among 
the Greeks and Romans, was essentially heterogeneous and repel- 
lent alike in its interior structure and in its external relations. The 
Jew had his Court of the Gentiles at the very entrance of his Holy 
Temple, and he looked forward to the day when all the nations of 
the earth should be blessed in Abraham, the Father of the Faithful. 
But the wall of partition between Greeks and Barbarians, between 
conquering Romans and their subject peoples, erected an impassable 
barrier to the very concept of human solidarity. And this barrier 
was as infrangible on the moral as on the political side. Even 
Aristotle, with all his learning and i)hilosophy, thought it ethical to 
hold that Barl)arians had no rights wJiich (rreeks were bound to 
respect — a doctrine which we must not criticise too severely, in 



*Phtedo: The Blessed Land pictured in the Tale of Sinimias. Cf 
The Tale of Kr in the Republic. 

t The Happy Land described in the Fourth Eclogue : 
Omnis feret omnia tellus : 
Non rastros patietur humus, uoii vinea falceni. 
% "Man sieht : die rhilosophie konne auch ihren Chiliasmus liaben." — 
Idee zu eiiier Allgemeinen (ieschichte. Achter vSatz. 



THE SCIKKCE OF UNIVP^RSAL HISTORY. 7 

view of the conduct long allowed to themselves by European Christ- 
ians and even by the Founders of the American Commonwealth in 
their dealings with tlie African race. The moral order as expounded 
by Aristotle was pan-Hellenic, not cosmopolitan. 

With the advent of Christianity a new theory of human history, 
a new Weltanschauung, came to the front. Christianity brought 
into the world what we may call an "enthusiasm for humanity," 
made that enthusiasm as broad as the race, and in some of its later 
phases exalted that enthusiasm into a fanatic passion for martyrdom. 
The reflective reason of the Christian Church early attempted to bring 
the drift of the ages within the purview of a dogmatic philosophy 
of history. The first sketches of this dogmatic philosophy, to say 
nothing of the rude delimitations of time essayed by Eusebius, may 
be found in the writings of St. Epiphanius, of St. Jerome, of Orosius, 
and others, but above all in the elaborate expositions of St. Augustine 
in his De Civifaie Dei. This same method of philosophizing on 
theological lines alone was naturally pursued during the Middle 
Ages, and may be said to have gone out with a blaze of light in 
the brilliant dialectic of l5ossuet's Hisfoire Universelle, which, like 
the arrow shot from the sounding bow of Acestes, marked its path 
with flame and then vanished into the thin air, because it was not 
positive enough in its aim, and was indeed shot into a medium too 
ethereal to sustain its flight. 

Yet we shall do something less than justice to this purely theo- 
logical philosophy of history if we estimate its significance by the 
scientific value of the imperfect and one-sided inductions on which 
it was based, or by the logical validity of the reasoning with which 
it was buttressed under a fanciful and allegorical method of script- 
ural exegesis. When St. Jerome finds a full-orbed theory of escha- 
tology in the Book of Uaniel ; when St. Epiphanius, acutely gen- 
eralizing the stages of human history before Christ into " Barba- 
rism," " Scythism," " Judaism," and "Hellenism," hangs this 
differentiation for its sufficient support on a single text of Scripture ;-'= 

*The text may be found in Colossians iii, ii, where vSt. Paul declares 
that in the renewal and transformation wrought by Christianity there was 
tobeneither "Greek" nor "Jew," neither " Barbarian " nor "Scythian," 
but Christ was to be " all and in all,'' a statement by which the Apostle, 
as interpreted by Epiphanius, was held to signify that "Barbarism," 
" Scythism," "Judaism," and " Hellenism" were human culture-stages 
preparatory to the coming of Christ. See the Panarion, Lib. i, and else- 
where. 



.S COLI'^rBTAN UNIVEHSTTY STT'DIES. 

when St. Augusiine projects his whole theory of human history 
along the line of six successive ages, corresponding to the six 
demiurgic days of the Creative AVeek in the book of Genesis, -'^ and 
finds that this same number of ages was typified by the six water- 
pots which figured in the miracle of Cana of Galilee, f we are not 
to infer that these theological teachers drew their speculations out 
of the Biblical texts alone, by sheer force of allegorical exegesis. 
The texts were rather used (for polemical and apologetic reasons) 
by way of accommodation to a preconceived theory of human his- 
tory deeply imbedded in the Christian consciousness and resting on 
the express doctrine that Christ came " in the fulness of time." If 
in "the fulness of time," then the prior stages of human evolution 
were preparatory to his advent. 

These crude and primitive theories of the philosoi)]iy of history 
are chiefly interesting to us as serving to show the theorizing and 
philosophizing bent impressed on the early Christian mind in the 
presence of the collective plienomena of human history, and as serv- 
ing further to show that all such theories of progress must needs 
take their color and direction, their point of de})arture and their 
norm, from the prevailing intellectual method of the epoch in which 
they appear. The prevailing method of the Church Fathers was 
theological, and hence they naturally turned to Theology for guid- 
ance and succor in framing a philosophy of history. As Christian- 
ity was the normal projection of Judaism, and as the middle wall of 
partition between Jew and Gentile had now been broken down, the 
doctrine of a world-wide morality, as taught by the Hebrew seers, 
could henceforth be supitlemented and complemented by the doc- 
trine of a world-wide scheme of human redemption, to be worked 
out on purely religious lines. 

The historical philosoi)hy of St. Jerome and of St. Augustine 
continued to be in the main the received philosoi)hy of the School- 
men, so far as they had any philosophy of history at all during the 
Midale Ages. In that time of storm and stress, when the Bar- 
barians had brought a new social cliaos into Europe, it was hard to 
see any "drift of the ages." And the piecemeal structure of the 
Feudal System — a form of political organization in which each 
feudal molecule was repulsive to every other — had well nigh come 

*/?^ Geiiesi contra I\Iaiiich<TOS, Lib. I ; De Trinitate, Lib. IV, cap. 4, 
and elsewhere. 

t Tractatiis IX in Joannis Evangeliuui. 



THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 9 

to destroy the ver}' capacity of men to think cngrand h\ the sphere 
of human society. The social elements had been ground up from 
top to bottom, and were waiting for new points of crystallization. 

These new points of crystallization came with the Renaissance 
period. In its first flush this time of n&w birth brought to the 
European mind a season of rejuvenation with all that was hot and 
heady in the youthful senses. Next came a period of sobered 
thoughtfulness, under the sway of that larger discourse of reason 
which summoned the Humanists to grapple with the deeper prob- 
lems of secular history. In the dawn of the Renaissance men were 
so absorbed in looking backward to the integral fountains of ancient 
culture that they may well be pardoned if they saw, at that stage, 
no forward movement in the stream of time. It was not until they 
had gained a soberer point of view in what we may call the autumn 
of the Renaissance that they were prepared to grasp and to con- 
struct a scheme of progress in the affairs and ideas of the world. 

Pattison in his Life of Isaac Casaubon has given us a vivid pic- 
ture of the sombre thought which succeeded the wild outburst of 
joy and surprise when the European mind first escaped from the 
swaddling-bands of Scholasticism. A very malady of thought now 
settled on the minds of thinking men as they stood before the 
veiled Isis of History. They found it difficult to construe an ascetic 
Christianity with the flowers of Greek and Roman culture. A great 
step was taken in bridging over the chasm between the Pagan Past 
and the Christian Present when all that was best in the literature of 
Greece and Rome was accepted by scholastic thinkers as the pro- 
paedeutic of theological culture. Universities were now founded 
in quick succession to keep alive the tradition of human learning. 
The dates at which the great Universities of Europe were founded 
translate themselves for us into a philosophy of universal education, 
and into a philosophy of universal history as well. From these 
high points of observation the foremost minds of Europe were pre- 
paring to get the bearings of man's collective thought. The human 
race, in the person of its file-leaders, was for the first time " orient- 
ing " itself. 

This process of intellectual orientation began to find clear ex- 
pression in the seventeenth century. The seventeenth century 
must ever remain a most interesting period for the philosophical 
student of history. It was then that the foundations of the Science 
of Universal History were for the first time securely laid on the 



10 COLUMBIAN rXIVERSITY STUDIES. 

broad basis of the world's collective knowledge. It was during 
this age that a few thoughtful scholars rose to challenge the preten- 
sions of the Ancients in knowledge and of the Scholastics in philos- 
ophy. The fact of the continuity of human history slowly dawned 
on the perception of a few penetrating and clear-sighted intellects, 
and this sense of continuity came at length to full and clear expres- 
sion in the now hackneyed saying of Pascal, that the succession of 
men, as measured along the lines of a ])rogressive knowledge, ought 
to be considered as " one same man who lives always and learns 
continually." The saying was a spark of light tlirown out in that 
collision of wits known in the literary history of the seventeenth 
century as the " Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. "-'^ It 
was virtually a saying as old as the time of St. Augustine, f but 
when the idea was hinted by the Bishop of Hippo, while the ears 
of men were still tingling with the stupendous crash of the Roman 
Empire, it sounded in theological polemics rather than in historical 
philosophy. The fallow ground of the Fifth Century after Christ 
had no furrow in which such a seed-corn could lodge, and no pre- 
pared soil in which it could grow and i'ructify. 

I have elsewhere remarked on the insufficiency of a statement 
made by the eminent historian, the late Dr. Edward A. Freeman, 
when, in referring to the fruitful lesults of the Comparative Method 
as applied to the phenomena of language, of mythology, of folk- 
lore, of politics, and of history, he characterizes that method as a 
"discovery" of the Nineteenth Century equal in value to the 
Revival of Learning. The (Comparative Method is as old as the 
reflective thought of man. It was used by Aristotle in the field of 
politics (he compared two hundred and fifty distinct polities) as 
fieely as it has ever been used in modern times by Freeman or 
Herbert Spencer. But the organon of com[)arative method failed 
to prove an instrument of highest knowledge in the hands of the 
Stagirite l^ecause he failed to perceive and apply in connection 
with it an ancillary principle indispensable to its full fruitage, to 
wit, the continuity of human history, as marked by the gulf stream 



*For a compendious history of this famous "Quarrel" the reader ma}' 
consult the pages of Rigault : " Histoire de la Ouerelle des Anciens et 
des Modernes." Paris, 1856. 

fSicut autem unius homiuis, ita liumani generis, quod ad Dei populum 
pertinet, recta eruditio per quosdam articulostemporum tanquam tetatum 
profecit accessibus." De Civitate Dei, lib. X, cap. 14. 



THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 11 

of human progress. He not only failed to perceive the unity of 
human history, but based his defence of the Greek social system on 
its positive denial. That he should have failed to perceive the con- 
tinuity of human history is easily explained by the fragmentary 
state of civil society in his day and by the smallness of the arc 
through which the social oscillation of the race had moved when 
it was passed by him in review. It was only after the slow and 
gradual accumu.lation of social changes had reached a certain height 
that the continuity of the social movement could possibly come 
into clear perspective. As Comte well says, " The strongest head 
of all antiquity, the great Aristotle, was so dominated by his age 
that he could not even conceive of a society which was not neces- 
sarily founded on slavery, the irrevocable abolition of which began 
none the less a few ages after him." 

From the day when this line and law of continuity became visible 
to speculative minds in the phenomena of history, it was seen that 
these phenomena could not only be compared, but that they could 
be classified and grouped in a serial and successive order. And 
when, at a later day, it came to be clearly conceived th?t the bond 
of connection between events in their series and successions was a 
genetic connection, a positive Science of Universal Historv became 
possible, and not before. 

Since the day of Vico the " Philosophies " of history have been 
in number numberless. Many and various are the spirals and curves 
which the ingenuity of men has projected on the dial-])late of time. 
In evaluating " the curve of progress," the speculative mind " loves 
to trace the contortions of the unruly spiral, and eschews a cusp as 
a historic anomaly." Too often, indeed, these "Philosophies" 
have been little more than the counterfeit presentments of their 
framers, as the Brocken phantom, at sight of which the traveller 
sometimes starts on the Hartz mountains, is nothing more than an 
enlarged shadow of himself, projected on some floating tapestry of 
cloud and fog ; but since the time when the law of a^i,'r//,?//V continuity 
in the facts of human history, as measured along the lines of ethical, 
social, and intellectual progress, has become a fixed possession, the 
Science of Anthropology has handed to the scientific student of his- 
tory the tape-lines and measuring-rods by which he can gauge the 
very age and body of the time, the very order and succession of 
human elaborations in the useful arts and in social institutions. 
From that time forth the Philosophy of History marches side by 



12 COLUMBrAX UNIVERSITY STUDIES. 

side with the Science of History, Science giving to Philosophy its 
fixed points of departure and its angles of vision, and Philosophy 
giving to Science the wider and higher perspectives which come 
from " thought's interior sphere." 

A genetic conception of historical events is not peculiar to our 
modern age. The peculiarity lies in the universality and accuracy 
with which the conception is api)lied under modern scientific 
method. King Hezekiah, twenty-five hundred years ago, had a 
clear conception of historical genetics when, in the sore travail of 
Judea in his day, he exclaimed, "The children are come to the 
birth and there is not strength to deliver." By this genetic symbol- 
ism he pointed to helpful measures of State which were likely to 
perish in their birlh-pangs for the want of a political opportunism 
which was equal to the crisis. St. Paul wielded this same genetic 
symbolism in the magnificent imagery under which he pictures the 
whole creation as groaning and travailing in pain together till now. 
This same genetic symbolism is caught up into verse by Matthew 
Arnold when he would portray a religious doubter wandering 
astray between an old faith which is extinct and a new faith which 
has not yet come to its full nativity — 

" Wandering between two worlds ; one dead, 
The other powerless to be born." 

Ikit between this rhetorical conception of historical genetics and 
the modern scientific conception of historical genetics there is a 
world-wide difference. The scientific worth of a conception de- 
pends, not on single observations used for purposes of literary 
emphasis, but on whole masses of observations, generalized, accord- 
ing to the homologies which they reveal, into principles of logical 
interpretation, and so made the basis of scientific systematization.* 
Homological reasoning depends, indeed, for its dee])est root and 
firmest ground on the facts of a genetic descent, and for this cause 
has an obvious superiority over mere aualogical reasoning in every 
department of philosopliy. 

Philosophy is organized tliought moving along the lines of uni- 
versality, and this organized thought becomes real and actual in 



* " Nicht die einfacht beobachteteThatsache niacht den Werth eiiier 
Entdeckung aus, soiideni die Artihrer Verweiiduiig und was man daraus 
zu folgern verniag.'' — Ambros : Geschichte der Musik, I, p. 457. 



THE SCIENCE OF UXIVERSAL HISTORY. 13 

History only when it is checked and verified at every point of its 
advance by the inductions of an exact and positive method. It was 
not until the science of Anthropology had staked out the starting- 
points and the boundaries of the social and civil evolution in the 
successive stages and stadia of human culture that these fixed points 
could serve as the framework of a true and coherent Philosophy of 
History. If there be a genetic connection among the events of 
the social world ; if the days of the human race, like the days of the 
individual man, are bound each to each '' by a natural piety " (and 
this is what the genetic conception of history implies and presup- 
poses), then there must be an inherent connection in the series of 
events which mark the line and compose the law of human progress; 
and if there be an inherent connection, tlien this connection must 
be natural and necessary ; and if there be a natural and necessary 
connection of human events (so far as tliat connection is inherent 
and genetic), then the scientific statement of that connection, in 
proportion to its continuity and its universality, will lend itself to 
the purposes of real truth in point of content and of logical perfec- 
tion in point of form. There is, therefore, what we may call a 
dialectic of history. In the discussions of political society constant 
provision must be made for vast processes of intellectual division 
and subdivision, of political dissection and analysis, in order to 
reach some new social, political, or economical synthesis. To the 
extent in which there is a logic of events and a natural order in the 
genetic evolutions of human society there must be a dialectic of his- 
tory. " What reason is to the individual man, history is to the race," 
says Schopenhauer, and as the individual man goes tlirough his dia- 
lectical processes in reaching the conclusions which govern his 
conduct, so political society has its dialectical processes, organized 
on a vaster scale, for the purpose of reaching the political readjust- 
ments and the economic transformations required by a progressive 
civilization. But when tliis dialectic of the historic movement 
comes to be reca|MtuIated in the terms of a synoptical review, if it is 
to have truth for its matter and logic for its form, it must at all 
points be subject to the syllogistic processes of a positive science of 
history, and cannot be left to the free expatiations of the philo- 
sophical intellect, even in the case of a mind as imperial as that of 
Kant or Hegel. Kant, writing in 1784, shows that he had mi.ssed 
the whole dialectic scope of the social and civil evolution by declar- 



14 COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES. 

ing that all secular history, beyond that of Greece, was a terra in- 
cogniia, and that the sole beginning of all true history was to be 
sought in the first pages of Thucydides.* Hume had said the same 
thing before him. 'Hie attempt to construct a theory of human 
progress on such a narrow basis of human experiences was a predes- 
tined failure. It was as if men should undertake to discuss the onto- 
genetic characters of a given animal without any knowledge of its 
phylogenetic predecessors, or as if we should assume to discuss the 
hierarchy of animal forms without a knowledge of Palajontology. 
Today we dig for the beginnings of human history in the bone-caves 
of the Somme valley, in the Lake Habitations of Switzerland, in 
the kitchen-middens of Denmark, in the mounds of the American 
aborigines, or wherever else the gray forefathers of the human race 
have left the traces of their primeval existence. With the mete-wand 
of the comparative method in our hands, as swayed along the lines of 
a continuous genetic evolution, we can enter the domain of kindred 
and tribes known to us by onl\- a few scattered relics that have 
come down from the buried generations of men, and with these 
relics in our hands we can, b\' homological reasoning, reconstruct 
the social states from which they sprang as surely as the compara- 
tive anatomist rebuilds the megatherium from its mandible or the 
dinornis from a fragment of its femur. 

All our ])rocesses of historical construction in the domain of 
CiiltitrgescJiichte imply at bottom a logical i)rocess in the order of 
social evolutions. We do but l)ring our subjective logic into cor- 
respondence with the objective logic of human events. As Paleon- 
tology places in our hands a measuring rod by which we read back- 
ward, in the successive forms of animal life, from the highest to the 
lowest, so, in the successive stages of human culture, we read back- 
ward from the highest to the lowest that we may then reason for- 
ward from the lowest to the highest. It was for the want of such 
a critical and dialectical method that a master of polemics like St. Au- 
gustine stumbled and fell over the fossil remains of a gigantic molar 
tooth which, as he tells us, he once discovered on the shores of the 
Mediterranean, and which, because it was so big that a hundred 
grinders like ours could have been carved from it, he assumed to have 
originally belonged to one of the giants supposed to have lived before 



■■•■Kant : Werke, Band IV, \ i6o (Hartenstein's ed.). 



THE SCIEXCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 15 

the Flood.* If the good Bishop had been armed with the homo- 
logical method of modern Comparative Osteology, he would have 
known at once that the tootli belonged to some huge beast of the 
primeval period, and not to one of our antediluvian ancestors. 

If it shall seem that I have been slow in leading up to the main 
topic of this discourse, I beg leave to premise that, by necessary 
implication, I had led up to it in what I liave called the first sketch 
of universal history — that is, of history with universality in it. As 
it is impossible to construe the actual facts of universal history apart 
from the moral order lifted into consciousness by Judea, apart from 
the intellectual order of Greece, apart from the political order of 
Rome, apart from the religious order of Christendom, so, from the 
date of the instauration of Scientific Method it has become impossi- 
ble to construe the fact and law of human progress apart from the 
Physical Sciences. The Science of Universal History has become 
today the indis|)ensable complement of these Sciences, because that 
history has come more and more to take from them its regulative 
and its directive forces. And these regulative forces, reacting on 
the mental outlooks of men, have transformed for this generation 
our whole maiiierc de voir. Each vantage ground of truth gained 
from the conquered territory of ignorance and superstition is be- 
coming more and more \.\\t point (Vappui oi further assaults on the 
kingdom and power of darkness. It is this war of mind against 
matter, of- moral law against brute force, of scientific foresight 
against blind natural selection, wh.ich is destined, in the scientific 
vision of Clifford, to put a period to the fight of human poverty 
(so far as that poverty results from false and unscientific economics), 
in order that the human race, freed from the fetters of a false pub- 
lic economy, may at length have "a free hand and a free foot " 
with which to begin the fight against inexactness of thought in all 
realms of study, and against base aims and low ideals in all depart- 
ments of human inquiry. This is only another way of saying that, 
in the stage of evolution which civil society has reached today 
among the foremost nations of the earth, economic questions are at 
the fore, 

*Vidi ipse lion solus, sed aliquot nieciun in Uticeusi littore molarein 
homiiiis deutem tain iugeuteni, ut, si in iiostrorum dentiuni inodulos 
miuutatim concideretiir, centum nobis videretur facere potuisse. Sed 
ilium gigantis alicuius fuisse crediderim. De Civitate Dei, I^ib. XV, 
cap. 9. 



IG ('f)L(l.\riUAN rXrVKKSITY STUDII^S. 

In the fluxes of human society, as in the fluxes of nature, nothing 
is dont per saifinn. Society has, indeed, its dynamic movement 
which works to definite ends and purposes by virtue of all the ins a 
tergo which comes from the past generations, and by virtue, too, of 
the new objective points which are found for this vis a tergo by the 
clarified reason. This social dynamic often works below the hori- 
zon of the collective social consciousness, and therefore works 
blindly and dimly, instead of working with the clear prevision of 
a teleologic purpose which can be verified by Social Science. In 
each and every one of the next stages which lie before it in the evo- 
lution of humanity, the human race is called to reiM-oduce the con- 
ditions of an intellectual childhood, and has to learn l)y making 
mistakes. In this way, for the want of an experience which has 
clarified itself into a directive rule of wise conduct, much of the 
vis a tergo coming from the past generations is dissipated in the 
futilities of unscientific politics ; but none the less do we see that a 
residue of this dynamic is surely conserved and is slowly correlated 
into the new and the successive forms of human culture. As Tylor 
well says, "There is no human thought so primitive as to have lost 
its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken 
its connection with our own life."* 

The increasing purpose in social dynamics has its laws of develop- 
ment and its laws of arrested growth. The intellectual attitude in 
which man stands to nature will deteiniine the extent of-liis domin- 
ion over nature. There are certain necessary facts and laws of 
nature which lie on the surface of things, and to the extent in which 
they control human action they may be said to enter into all the 
free activities of men and to conditionate those activities. In the 
lower stages of savagery man is held in servile subjection to even 
the surface facts of nature, and it is this subjection which consti- 
tutes the misery of savager\'. 

Where the surface facts of nature are observed willi minutest care, 
where the relations of the famil}' and of the whole social order are 
bound in a cast-iron system of ethics, jjolitics, and econonn'cs, and 
then transmitted from generation to generation by a rigid and me- 
chanical system of education, we have all the natural conditions 
which explain tlie stationary civilization of a country so old and 
yetso unprogressive as the Empire of China. The deeper resources 

* Tylor : Primitive Culture, vol. 2, p. 409. 



THE SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY. 3 7 

of nature are a sealed l:)ook to the Chinese intellect, and the whole 
educational system of China is ingeniously contrived to train the 
memory at the expense of the reason. What wonder that men halt 
with their brains and that women halt with their feet in China, 
when brains and feet are alike put in constriction? 

Besides the laws and facts- of nature which lie on the surface of 
things, there are other laws and facts in nature which reside in the 
deeper relations of things — laws and facts which, even in the most 
advanced civilizations, have been of slow and late discovery by the 
reflective reason of man. Now, to the extent in which these laws 
and facts, after discovery, are seen to enter into and to aggrandize 
the activities of men in the figure of society, they may be said to 
energize the enlarged activities which they conditionate, and so must 
needs accelerate the progressional force of society in all directioHS. 
Everybody sees that our whole civilization is today conditionated 
by the new appliances of modern life — l)y the steam-engine, the 
telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, and the thousand other 
applications of scientific art. The new conditions thus created are 
vastly more significant for their reflex influence on the human mind 
than for their direct influence on human conduct. The modifica- 
tions which these agencies have wrought in the mental habitudes of 
men are indeed a thousand times more important than the modifi- 
cations which they liave wrought in our business relations and in 
our social institutes. As civilization takes more and more into its 
bosom the resources and the agencies of a rational science, unlock- 
ing the deeper mysteries of nature, the forms of civilization are cor- 
respondingly changed, and the rates of the civilizing movement are 
correspondingly quickened. The civilized man of today is a trans- 
formed man living in a transformed environment, a transforming 
man living in an environment wliich he is daily transforming more 
and more according to the growing wants and aspirations of ad- 
vancing civilization. The light of our best seeing and the thought 
of our best thinking involuntarily turn to scientific method for their 
justification. We live and think and act in a world of concepts 
which Science has slowly formed and slowly clarified. And "as 
the way in which these general conceptions are bound together has 
been determined for us by the previous thought of society, it follows 
that our ancestors have made the world to be what it is for us." 

The subtle processes of the scientific mind have penetrated more 
and more deeply into the subtle processes of nature, and this pene- 
tration of the reason into nature has retroacted on the reason itself, 



18 (J()LUMBIAN UXIVERSITY STUDIES. 

and so has retroacted on our whole social and economic system, 
and even on our public morality. Everybody sees that the discov- 
eries of modern science have come, by their daily uses and applica- 
tions, to lay new burdens of moral care as well as of intellectual 
accuracy and of economic thrift on the whole generation which they 
have invested with such vastly augmented physical powers, and 
which they have endued mentally with such a purified vision. As 
the scientific mind, in its present attitude toward nature, has been 
of slow genesis, so the greater mental exactitude wrought in our 
habits by scientific method is a late endowment of the human race, 
and may be said to have come in with the era of Kxi)erimentation 
in the search for scientific truth in tlie domain of nature. As has 
been well said by a German thinker, " the more complete the con- 
quered power of nature is, so mucli the more splendid is the progress 
of reason in its conquering freedom, for so much the more excellent 
is the instrument which has been won from nature for the service of 
reason. In this way it is that the unlimited supremacy of reason 
over nature, through the operations of human free agency, will 
bring about an universal harmony Ijetween nature and human free 
agency." * 

The world is coming to be governed more and more by the veri- 
fied thought of its collective intelligence, and this verified thought 
is more and more a distillation of scientific method. The problems 
which confront every advanced civilization today, whctlier in i)oli- 
tics or economics, in sanitary reform or in criminal jurisprudence, 
are essentially scientific i)roblems, and i)roblems which increase in 
difficulty and complexity in proportion as civil society is translated 
further and further from the "state of nature," and is raised into 
'higher and higher altitudes of moral observance and intellectual 
foresight. The social problems of each living age are set for it by 
the range and gear of its social forces. Questions of the blood tie, 
of marriage law, and of nide atonement for crime dominated the 
primeval clan. Questious of political status dominated the (ireek 
city-state. Questions of personal status dominated the Feudal sys- 
tem. Questions of a Balance of Power dominated Europe after 
the great European vStates had formed themselves around their sev- 
eral centres, on the dissolution of the Feudal System. As human 
society has moved fiu"ther and fiu'ther from status to contract, the 
individual opinion of men has been more and more free to move 
more and more widely in the domain of ideas, until at length we 

* Wachsmuth : " Entwurf eiiier Theorie der Geschichte," p. 60. 



THK SCIENCE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY 



19 



can truly say that " ideas govern the civilized world."* And the 
ideas which govern the world to-day tend more and more to incar- 
nate themselves into new forms of social right and new expedients 
of economic production and distribution, working reconstructively 
on the whole existing figure of human society. What we call ' ' civ- 
ilization " is indeed nothing more nor less than a state of coerced 
and unstable equilibrium resulting from actions, reactions, and inter- 
actions in a vast complex of moral, social, political, and scientific 
forces generated by the restless activity of the human intellect, and 
perpetually stirred into new forms of genetic activity, as the condi- 
tion of improving them in their working gear, and of thereby increas- 
ing their resultant energy, so far as they are comprised at any given 
epoch in what we may call the " parallelogram of organized society." 
It is the obvious lesson of universal history that the Stream of 
Tendency sets more and more in all directions toward the control 
of individual thought and conduct by the moral and intellectual 
forces of the collective social intelligence; not indeed that the in- 
dividual is to be " withered " by such control, but that he is to find 
only the freer and fuller play for all his faculties under a perfected 
science of sociology. Under such a perfected science men will 
have no more right to think and act wrong concerning scientific 
questions in finance or currency, in taxation or economics, than 
they have to think and act wrong today concerning scientific ques- 
tions in geometry or astronomy, in physics or in chemistry. The 
bald enunciation of this Comtian canon of Positive Science,! with its 
applications to the phenomena of modern politics, will suffice at 
once to ascertain the wide distance at which we stand today from a 
perfected Science of Human History, considered in its relation to the 
arts of statesmanship. And this Comtian canon ascertains equally 
well the wildness of the unscientific dreams with which a hysterical 
Socialism or a frantic Nihilism would fain perplex or shatter the 
political framework which enfolds the existing parallelogram of our 
social forces. Their schemes proceed on the basis of a process 
which is cataclysmal and revolutionary. The schemes of the scien- 

*See some interesting observations under this head iu Bishop Stubbs's 
" Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History," p. 208 e^ seq. 

fComte : Appendice General au Systeme de Politique Positive : Plan 
des Travaux Scientifiques uecessaires pour reorganiser la Societe : Paris : 
1822 : " II n' y a point de liberte de conscience en astrouoniie, en physique, 
eu cheuiie. en physiologie nieme, en ce sens que chacuu trouverait ab- 
surde de ne pas croire de coufiauce aux principes etablis dans ces sciences 
par les homnies conipetents." 



20 COLUMBIAN UNIVERSITY STUDIES. 

tific reformer proceed on the basis of a process which is genetic and 
evohitionary. But even these Fata Morgana of the Socialist and 
Anarchist may have their lesson for the student of universal history. 

To suppose, with Emmanuel Kant, that the human race, after 
having made progress through the past ages, will at some future day 
come to a standstill, or even begin to retrograde, is to presuppose 
that at some time there may be among all mankind a suspension, or 
even a reversed action, of all the motive powers which have brought 
the human race to its present altitudes of scientific and philosophic 
observation. The cavil ignores, besides, the momentum impressed 
on modern civilization by all the vis a tergo that stands behind it 
in the accumulated strivings of the past generations — strivings 
which, as transmitted to us, have been harnessed into new forms 
and vehicles of social energy, working more and more dynamically. 

In review of the past, who shall venture to say that the Science 
of Universal History has wandered into " the dark backward 
and abysm of time" to watt us l)ack a message of despair? Is 
it in accordance with the laws of historical probability that the 
human race is even approaching its terminal dynasty, when to- 
day, more than ever before, the bosom of civilized society is teem- 
ing with new births begotten by the Weltgeist z\ the highest stage 
of its creative energy? I answer, No, not in the name of a sub- 
jective or philosophical necessarianism, but in the name of Positive 
Science pledged to a career of boundless concjuest over the forces 
of nature. I answer. No, in the name of ail the Hebrew seers and 
Christian sages who divined the universality of the moral order and 
foretold a Reign of Righteousness on the earth. I answer. No, in 
the name of that clearly discovered law of human progress which 
has come today to set the seal of History to the forecast of 
Prophecy. I answer. No, in the name of that Renaissance period 
which not only found a new earth for man through Columbus, and 
a new heaven tin-ough Copernicus, l)ut hel[)ed man to " find him- 
self" (so Michelet phrases it) by lielping liim, with observations 
however rude and imperfect, to get some hint of his true bearings 
on the stormy sea of Universal History. I answer. No, by all the 
Agony and Bloody Sweat of the countless generations which toiled 
and suffered for us, and into the fruit of whose labors we have en- 
tered. I answer. No, by all the battles fought for Truth and Right 
which have been won in the ages past, and I answer. No, a thou- 
sand times, in the name of all the battles fought for Truth and 
Rifrht which have been lost, but must l>c ivon. 



The Columbian University, 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES. 

THE FACULTY. 

JAMES C. WELLING, LL. D., President, 
Professor of the Philosophy of History. 

CHARLES E. MUNROE, S. B., Dean, 
Professor of Chemistry. 

The Rev. ADONIRAM J. HUNTINGTON, A. M., D. D., 

Professor of Greek. 

The Rev. SAMUEL M. SHUTE, A. M., D. D ,• 
Professor of EngUsh. 

ANDREW P. MONTAGUE, A. M., Ph. D., 

Professor of Latin. 

J. HOWARD GORE, B. S., Pn. D., 

Professor of Mathematics. 

LEE D. LODGE, A. M., Ph. D., 

Professor of French. 

D. KERFOOT SHUTE, A. B., M. D., 
Professor of Anatomy. 

FRANCIS R. FAYA, Jr., C. E., 
Professor of Civil Engineering. 

THEODORE N. GILL, M. D., Ph. D., 

Professor of Zoology. 

OTIS T. MASON, A. M., Ph. D., 
Lecturer on Anthropology. 

CLEVELAND ABBE, A. M., Ph. D., LL. D., 

Professor of Meteorology. 

HERMANN SCHONFELD, Ph. D., 
Professor of German. 

The Rev. J. MACBRIDE STERRETT, B. D., D. D., 
Professor of Philosophy. 

EDGAR FRISBY, A. M., U. S. N., 
Professor of Astronomy. 

WILLIAM C. WINLOCK, A. B., 

Professor of Astronomy. 

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, A. M., LL. D., 

Professor of Philosophy. 

EMIL A. DE SCHWEINITZ, A. M., Ph. D., 

Professor of Bio-Chemistry. 

FRANK W. CLARKE, S. B., 
Professor of Mineral Chemistry. 

HARVEY W. WILEY, A. M., M. D., Ph. D., 
Professor of Agricultural Chemistry. 

The Rev. FRANK H. BIGELOW, A. M., 

Professor of Solar Physics. 

ALEXANDER S. CHRISTIE, LL. M., 
Professor of Mathematical Physics. 

GEORGE P. MERRILL, Ph. D., 

Professor of Geology. 

EXUM PERCY LEWIS, B. S., 
Instructor in Electrical Engineering. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



018 485 140 4 



The Columbian University, 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



Collegiate, Scientific, Professional, and Graduate 
Instruction is given in the Columbian University in six 
departments : The Columbian College, the National 
Medical College, the School of Dentistry, the 
Columbian University Law School, the Corcoran 
Scientific School, and the School of Graduate 
Studies. 

Besides the foregoing higher departments, the 
University has under its management a Preparatory 
School, in which students are prepared for College, 
for the Military Academy at West Point, or for the 
Naval Academy at Annapolis. 

For catalosfues address The Res^istrar of the Uni- 
versity. 

For other information address The President of 
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